Travel Brands Rethink E-Mail Strategies to Target Millennials

James O'Brien, Skift

- Apr 14, 2015 6:30 am

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From responsive design and targeted sendings, to pushed content and pulling travelers into a fluid cross-channel narrative — e-mail marketers are steering the industry’s course toward more reliable conversions, more of the time.

The impetus to create more and more volume — to segment and target and send and follow up — all of this still requires marketing directors to strike a delicate balance. And sometimes play on a different game board altogether.

For example, among Millennials, said Tammy Lucas, at Best Western, the inbox might not actually be the first place to most effectively reach certain travelers.

“The world is cyclical, as we know,” Lucas said. “And our plugged-in generation audience seem to welcome direct mail more so than e-mails. They’ve grown up with technology versus some of us who were thrown into technology. And so, receiving a post card or a piece of direct mail — albeit more expensive, sometimes — they actually welcome that.”

Across industries, questions persist. Analysis within the past half-decade shows that a significant percentage of Millennials do use the Internet to send and receive e-mail, at least occasionally.

Additionally notable about the percentages in the above chart is that there was no statistically significant difference between Millennial, Gen X, and Baby Boomer respondents. All were between 54% and 57% likely to have sent or receive an e-mail within the past 24 hours.

Whatever the incidence of their interaction with electronic messages, at TravelZoo, Justin Soffer sees the responses of Millennials to e-mail marketing to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, product specific.

“Certainly there are a bunch of people within that segment who don’t interact with e-mail,” he said. “But then certainly there are a bunch who do.”

“A longer escorted tour of Europe would probably be something that would be less likely to appeal to that audience — the Millennial audience,” he said. “Whereas, we see urban hotel stays, flight offers, some of the last-minute content” appeal to Millennials among other subscriber categories, more often.